DjangoReinhardt's comments

The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...

For people new to HN, this is the comment dewey is referring to, I think. 'dhouston' is Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox.

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Hardcore mode blurs every thing you type, so you have no idea if you are writing correctly. All you have to go by is your judgement and the belief that you do not misspell your words. And even if you did, you are willing to edit it all out later.

I can see the appeal of doing this for people who worry too much about what they are writing and constantly go back to edit their words and spellings. However, this is a stupid idea because going back to make minor edits allows the brain to formulate the next thought and frame it into better sentences.

By vomiting everything in one flow, you are simply increasing the amount of work required in terms of editing and re-writing the incorrect parts. Not to mention the large amount of proof-reading work that will inevitably follow all your work.

Does hardcore mode allow pauses? Let's see. Five potatoes to figure it out... Yes it does. Same five-potato time-limit.

Ah, too many potatoes.

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I was sweating buckets the whole time. I hate the idea of my writing vanishing, so the pressure was quite high to keep typing...

I really feel Troy has handled HIBP very, very carefully, honestly, and with the utmost transparency so far. He seems to have put in a lot of thought into everything - whether it is rolling out a feature or planning the future of HIBP.

1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?

2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/

[0] www.geek.com/apps/facebook-app-now-listens-and-records-audio-when-you-post-updates-from-your-phone-1595873/

[1]http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-pho...

Even if you haven't signed up for a facebook account but someone you know has an account, they by proxy, you have an account. Merely existing as a contact in their address book is enough to create a shadow profile with facebook. Their deep-learning algos can collate such data from all your friends and serve you correspondingly appropriate ads.

In fact, I just thought of an experiment that you could try sometime.

1. Buy a new cellphone number and store a small number of contacts (say, about 5) in your phonebook. Make sure all 5 of them have functional & active FB accounts.

2. Install the FB app on the phone and grant it access to your phonebook.

3. Open the app, create a new user and check out the list of suggested friends.

I think you'll be surprised.

[0] http://www.dailydot.com/news/facebook-shadow-profiles-privac...

> Anyone who fills out a tax form knows how harmful the U.S. tax code is today – punishing hard work, savings, and investment. American frustration with the tax code has prompted two decades of Washington, D.C. blue ribbon commissions and detailed plans to reform the code. These efforts have not changed the tremendous burden Americans face in complying with the U.S. tax code. If a tax code were designed to punish hard work, thrift, and investment, the current U.S. tax code could serve as a blueprint.

Autosummarizer[1] summarizes the first paragraph as follows:

> If a tax code were designed to punish hard work, thrift, and investment, the current U.S. tax code could serve as a blueprint.

Good times, America.

[0] https://www.greatagain.gov/policy/tax-reformeconomic-vision.... [1] http://autosummarizer.com/index.php

The problem is, the feed/stream API endpoints for most of the services mentioned above, either do not exist or have been removed.

- FB and Instagram no longer provide them, for sure.

- WhatsApp doesn't have an official API - the last time I test-drove Yowsup, my number was 'blocked' by WhatsApp.

- No idea if there's an API for iMessage, although I get the feeling there mightn't be...

Screen-scraping all of these services is way too much effort for way little reward. Not to mention that FB keeps 'updating' its UI/UX quite frequently and Instagram doesn't show a 'feed' on the web if you login.

- FB messenger is based off the XMPP protocol, so yeah, there might be a way to access it without having to screen-scrape.

- There's a free/paid service called Integrated Inbox which integrates Google's services: http://integratedinbox.com/plans/

That leaves HN, reddit and the Google gang - is it really worth the time to integrate these into one service? Maybe one could build the basic structure over the weekend and then provide an option add-on different sites as a 'plugin'...

I knew of people attempting to create 'discount floats' based on geo-location - as in, a retailer with the app would 'float' a specific discount at a specific point and anyone with the app who happened to pass within a certain radius would get a notification/coupon of the discount.

However, it didn't pick up here in India because smartphones and app downloads weren't all that ubiquitous two years ago, when they tried to implement this idea. Now, the results may be different, who knows.

The music publishing and licensing industry (vastly different from the actual creators, mind you) isn't as straightforward as people believe it to be. Music licenses are extremely tricky and (often) subject to the whims of the publishing labels.

There is no standard rate for a licensing specific tracks (or set of tracks) and the licenses that are available in the market are either too broad and expensive or too narrow and useless.

The entertainment industry in general is a mess - nobody knows how to handle the internet as a viable platform and nobody is willing to risk their profits to attempt and make mistakes either. They are trying to force an outdated method built for a one-way channel (needle-hour plays) on a platform that primarily believes in two-way interactivity.

In other words, they are trying to license content by syndication in a world where RSS, APIs and interactive conversations are the norm - not only is it a ridiculously laughable concept, but it goes against the very grain of the entire thing.

The whole entertainment publishing and licensing industry is in dire need of an overhaul. Unfortunately, the question everyone is too busy asking, is the question everyone should be trying to answer together: "Who will bell the cat?"

ST3 + SublimeIntel + SublimeLinter and suddenly, I feel like a keyboard ninja. Believe me, for a newbie, that is a massive boost of confidence! :D

[0]: http://www.sublimetext.com/3

It took me a while to understand that my going-off-on-tangents had nothing to do with impatience. It had more to do with me not realizing that the last mile is the hardest. I would start everything with gusto but as soon as I hit a road-block, I would dawdle and eventually lose interest as soon as something new came up.

I now decide a (feasible) finish line in my head before starting a new activity and consciously check myself whenever I feel like I'm about to give up on it. I force myself to look at the finish line until I re-convince myself that I need to cross it before I can even think of giving up.

I am not 'there' yet but I am beginning to see some results and that eggs me on further. :)

Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!

TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).

Interestingly, I got this message when navigating to a secondary page:

> Cannot GET /get-involved

So true.

I mean, it was only a matter of time before they clamped down and claimed that you were violating section 3.A.iii of the ToS by reverse-engineering the WhatsApp protocol, right?

Don't get me wrong, I would have loved it if Yowsup was allowed as an (unofficial) API - or something like that. However, as a newbie to the world of programming & software development in general, I am trying to understand what was wrong about the DMCA notice. What, in your opinion, should they have done instead?